To track online users and target them for marketing and advertising purposes, current social networks, such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn, all favor “real identity” paradigms associated with “privacy controls.” The problem with “real identity” is that there is always a risk that a user's personal data may be sold, leaked (intentionally or by error), hacked, or subpoenaed by the government and that the “privacy controls”, in the end, don't control anything.
Even with the advent of newer systems based on “online personas”, “fake personas”, “avatars”, or “aliases”, these systems always establish a link between the “online personas” or “avatars” and the uniquely identifiable data of their users' real identities. As a result, even with such systems based on online personas, users' privacy can also be easily jeopardized; it only takes one keystroke error, one hacker, or one government subpoena to access the database of online personas or avatars and retrieve associated users' real identities.
To determine users' identities, current social networks, such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn use two types of identifiers: (a) Direct unique identifiers and (b) Indirect identifiers.
Direct unique identifiers enable the direct identification of individuals through unique identity attributes such as full name (e.g., first name, last name, middle initial, etc.), physical address, email address, phone number, social security number, and personal photos. These direct unique identifiers offer the easiest way to uniquely identify a person. Just one of these identifiers (e.g. a full name, a physical address, or a mobile phone number) will invariably lead to the user's real identity.
Indirect identifiers provide a less obvious way to identify an individual, but by combining relevant indirect identifiers, it is possible to quickly piece together someone's real identity. Indirect identifiers include such identity attributes as gender, date of birth, occupation, city of residence, workplace, location at a given time, shopping activity, friend connections, etc. For instance, in a small city, it will be very easy to determine a teacher's real identity by only knowing the teacher's gender, his/her date of birth and the school where he or she works. Or even two indirect identifiers may be enough to establish someone's identity; for instance, an online search with the two indirect identifiers “VP of Marketing” in “company X” will also generate a unique real identity.
With direct unique identifiers or via a combination of indirect identifiers, current social networks and potential eavesdroppers—individuals, hackers and government authorities—can easily track users' identities or derive them, thus intruding on users' privacy.
Accordingly, a need exists for an online solution that does not compromise users' privacy the way that current social media platforms do.